dating column

All posts tagged: London

One of the dating rituals I find most irritating is the trend for a shaved muff. As a working woman, I resent how expensive, sore, fiddly, cold and time-consuming it is. Sure, I’ve been working all week, studying for a diploma, going to the gym, making a curry, calling my mother, doing the food shopping, planning my weekend, doing my tax return, dismantling the Christmas tree, renewing some library books, vacuuming my bedroom, trying to work out where to recycle lightbulbs and sniffing the air vent to make sure the old lady next door’s not accidentally gassing herself – BUT PLEASE, LET ME SHAVE MY PUSSY FOR YOU.

I’ve invited the Thai for lunch with my friends. I don’t often introduce the people I’m seeing to my friends. It’s not that I’m sniffy or pompous about these things. It’s that I rarely date anyone where I can see a possible future and so don’t want to insinuate a closeness I don’t feel. When I eventually introduced Blue Eyes to my friends it felt like more obligatory than celebratory – the grudging culmination of 6 months of rocky dating. I’m also protective of my friendship group. I’ve worked hard to cultivate it, collecting my friends over the years like beloved bric-a-brac. Some I found myself, others I borrowed and others I stole, stuffing them in my pocket and legging it before anyone noticed. Ha! They’re mine now, suckers!

How are you getting on with your resolutions? Have you collapsed headfirst into a tiramisu yet? Lost all feeling in your thighs? Have you had a breakdown in the supermarket, entering with a shopping list of quinoa, beetroot and kale and leaving in tears with 12 tubs of butter? I can’t stand new years resolutions, aka, the annual flogging and gruel parade. I personally think it’s a miracle there aren’t more kale-related attacks at this time of year. I keep expecting to walk into my local grocer’s and see people lobbing mushrooms at one another, giggling uncontrollably and shouting FATTY BOOM BOOM.

I like someone. I met her a few weeks ago on a dating app but I didn’t get excited then because I know how fickle these apps can be: here today, gone tomorrow – or tonight or this afternoon or sometimes even by mid-morning before you’ve had a chance to open the hobnobs. That’s the worst. Please, let me eat my hobnob before you reject me. But she persevered and I persevered and a few days later I’m having a glass of wine with her in the bar of a five star hotel. It’s her choice and a good one. The room is beautiful, all done up in grandeur like an old royal, but sexy too, like she’s got her stockings on show. There’s also something seductive about being in a hotel, as if at any moment we could finish our drinks and slip into a four-poster upstairs.

It’s my fourth date with Blue Eyes and I’m heading to hers on a Friday night, overnight bag tucked smugly under my arm. She opens the door and she’s so bloody beautiful it takes all my willpower not to ravish her in the communal hallway.

What’s your type? People always ask me that and my response is always the same: I like femme girls. She can be tall, short or middle of the road; blond, brunette, red-head or blue-head; fair, tanned, dark or Boots’ finest; she can be a skinny little slip of a thing or a happy tumble of curves. But (insert grunt here) I like a woman to be a woman *swings club over shoulder and heads into cave*.

I’m filling my mate in on my disastrous date with the Irish: “Why are so many people so terrible at making conversation?” she laughs “it’s like it’s a dying art form. I mean, it’s not that hard to ask a few questions!” “I know! I blame the internet.”